This Week in Small Business: Happy Holidays?

The budget deficit widened in October. Robert Rubin writes: ““Now that the election is over, Washington’s attention is consumed by the looming combination of automatic spending cuts and tax increases known as the fiscal cliff. That combination poses risks, including economic contraction and erosion of confidence in government. But it also offers a chance to address our unsustainable and dangerous fiscal trajectory.” Kent Hoover analyzes four tax deals Congress can make to avert the fiscal cliff. Try out these five fiscal-cliff situations. Small and midsize manufacturers are already being hit by defense spending cuts. Bruce Bartlett believes that “our long-term fiscal future is better than it looks.” The United States is projected to be the world’s top oil producer in five years (but these two do not appear to be impressed).

A Pitney Bowes study finds most consumers do not plan to spend more than they spent last holiday season, and Matthew Wong suggests ways to meet that challenge. A former New York Times restaurant critic offers six fundamental rules for hosting a great Thanksgiving, and this Thanksgiving music videosomehow grabs more than eight million views. Google is providing a bunch of tools for holiday shoppers. Here are some ways the Skype Professional Network can help small businesses. A study finds that small businesses that have adopted online marketing practices have realized significant business benefits, ranging from improved campaign performance to higher return on marketing investment. Joe Pulizzi shares six small-business content marketing strategies.

@deluxecorp – What is the average loss for a business from payments fraud in 2011? $19,200!

The Week’s Best

Kayla Albert explains how failure can help you succeed: “Your failure can offer powerful insight to those around you. We are often very reluctant to share our failures with others because we are allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to criticism. But the truth is, being open about failure allows others to collect on the lessons we learned ourselves, and in speaking about it, we are more likely to become aware of what all of the takeaways were. We learn a great deal about life from the experiences of others, so the collective experience of failure among the entire human race allows us to steer our lives down a more positive, productive path. Therefore, there is no failure that doesn’t have the ability to help someone, somewhere.”

Chris Brogan says social media isn’t dead, but it’s boring. “It’s boring to talk simply about the tools because the tools are just a way to reach people. We can argue the details endlessly (I don’t believe much in Klout, for instance), and we can announce the premature death of Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and whoever. But it doesn’t matter. When we talk about restaurants (the tools), we mostly talk about the food (the content). When we talk about bands (tools), we talk about whether the music resonates (the content). When we talk about a good book (the content), we never ask what type of computer it was written on (the tools).”

James Fallows has a strategy for avoiding Petraeus-style e-mail disasters: “Never put anything in an e-mail message, to anyone, that would cause you serious problems if it fell into the wrong hands.”

This Week’s Question: What will you do next Monday when this column takes the week off?